Lazarsfeld, Merton and the Nazis

Editor’s note: This is an edited excerpt from a chapter in the book Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation by Liza Featherstone. The author’s footnotes and citations have been removed for this usage. For more information about the book visit https://goo.gl/KxaWjT. 

The story of the focus group does not begin in a political campaign war room, nor over a boozy Mad Men-era lunch on Madison Avenue. It begins in a far more staid – but perhaps even more socially complex – context: an academic dinner party.

Sociologist Robert K. Merton arrived with his wife, Suzanne, at the Manhattan home of Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his wife, Herta Herzog (significant in focus group history in her own right, but here, like many women of mid-century, relegated to the domestic sphere). It was November 1941 and both Merton and Lazarsfeld were the two newly hired sociologists at Columbia. The men hadn’t socialized with one another before this evening and it’s likely that both couples anticipated the dinner with some trepidation; after all, the men had very different sociological approaches and had, as Lazarsfeld would summarize it years later, been “appointed to perpetuate the feud” between statisticians and theoreticians in the department.

Lazarsfeld was a specialist in quantitative social research and the department needed to have such a person in order to compete with other sociology departments; quantitative sociology was still young and its methodologies were gradually taking shape. But data and statistics had their skeptics in the department among the social theorists, so Merton, a celebrated big-ideas man, was hired as well. Years later, Merton would be hailed in the New Yorker magazine as the world’s most famous sociologist, particularly well-known for his studies on how people influence one another. He popularized concepts that are still widely understood, such as “unintended consequences,” “role model” and the “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

The two men’s social backgrounds were even more distant than their academic orientations. While Lazarsfeld had been raised by middle-class socialists in Vienna, Merton, born Meyer Robert Schkolnick, was a child of immigrants raised in a Philadelphia slum. His adolescence had included a brief career as a party magician – hence his invented name, adopted because it sounded a little like Merlin – as well as periodic gang membership.

Merton and Lazarsfeld regarded one another somewhat warily at first. After all, like birds shipped in for a cockfight, it was not their job to become the best of friends.

Lazarsfeld, the older of the two – and by nature a political operator – thought it would be gentlemanly to invite Merton to dinner. But when the appointed evening rolled around, an awkward conflict arose. Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Social Research had a contract to test propaganda for the Office of War Information (OWI) (then called the Office of Facts and Figures), using technology Lazarsfeld had developed with his colleague Frank Stanton when testing radio programs for CBS. Although it was a Saturday, his government bosses called letting him know they needed him, on very short notice, to test a new program that night – when the Mertons were due to come to dinner. “It was extremely embarrassing,” Lazarsfeld would recall years later, “because the whole situation was rigged for Merton and me not to get along anyhow.” Cancelling seemed out of the question.

Instead, when the Mertons arrived, Lazarsfeld told Robert Merton not to take off his coat, that he had something to show him at his studio that would interest him. “We left the ladies here,” Lazarsfeld remembered. “What they did with the dinner, I don’t know.”

The two rival sociologists hurried downtown to the Office of Radio Research, a run-down old building on 59th Street – where a test audience was listening to This Is War.

Conceived by the U.S. Office of Facts and Figures – the year before it became the Office of War Information – this series, broadcast on all four commercial (radio) networks, was America’s first attempt to counter Nazi propaganda by explaining the war to Americans. The broadcast (as it ultimately aired) reads as an earnest meditation on reason, facts and the role of media – even state-funded media – in a democracy. Archibald MacLeish, prominent poet, Librarian of Congress and director of the War Department of Facts and Figures – read a sober letter from President Roosevelt. “The difficulty the American people have in following and understanding this war has been constantly on my mind of late,” the president mused in his letter. “This challenge to understanding, like the war itself, is a challenge we can meet successfully.” 

Though framed with childish simplicity, the series was nonetheless explicitly cast as rational, to distinguish it from Nazi-style appeals to primitive urges, as MacLeish emphasized that This Is War would “meet the Axis strategies of lies with the United People’s strategy of truth.” 

In the premiere, which was broadcast on February 14, 1942, a voiceover promised to counter fascist “lies with facts.” There was an implicit message here: the Allies can beat fascism because of, not despite, democracy’s appeals to the mind. As historian James Spiller has pointed out, the series was indeed propaganda, a sharp departure from radio networks’ previous neutrality on the war, slandering any dissenters as Axis stooges. 

Still, the Allies side was framed as intelligent, intended for thinking citizens. This was in keeping with the program’s portrayal of Axis masculinity as defined by depraved sex and violence, in contrast with the “manly self-control” of American men, who were domesticated for the greater good, defending the “house of civilization.” Narrator Robert Montgomery taunted Axis leaders with a measured confidence, no sneer or tough-guy bluster, only quiet contempt: “Hear that, Adolf? Hear that, Benito?” The rhetoric used in this program would serve as a model for U.S. government radio rhetoric throughout World War II, and it was shaped in crucial ways by the tests conducted by Lazarsfeld and his team at Columbia.

Americans during this period were not eager to go to war, either to engage in bloody conflict or to make the necessary sacrifices. In fact, though FDR is now remembered as a popular president, during the war he faced considerable opposition to his policies and began putting particular emphasis on public opinion research. Lazarsfeld’s project was one of many examples of how FDR’s administration used social science methods to figure out how to communicate with the public.

Though Spiller is correct that these efforts were propagandistic, they also offer a window on an elite rather different from the one that would rule the nation in later decades. Roosevelt and MacLeish seem confident that the American people are rational and capable of democracy; they see themselves as helping to inform and lead a body politic that could rise to the challenges of political engagement. It’s difficult to disagree with the central persuasive project of this political class: urging the masses to fight fascism and make democracy work. The focus group was created as a tool in this elite’s arsenal. 

In the shabby studio on 59th Street, there was no one-way mirror enabling observers to watch the discussion unseen, as there would be in a focus group situation today, so Merton and Lazarsfeld had to find spots at the edge of the room to watch the action as unobtrusively as possible.

A group of listeners – a little over a dozen – pressed buttons to indicate its “likes” and “dislikes,” which were then recorded by an early version of a computer. This was a contraption called the Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer, an early precursor of the programs that now allow us to see the feelings of Frank Luntz’s focus groups graphed live on national television – or that greet us if we are part of a test audience for a Hollywood movie.

Such technologies are commonplace in political and entertainment research today, but Lazarsfeld and his colleagues had only just developed them, so the sight was startling to the uninitiated. Merton, in a talk years later, would recall it as a “strange spectacle,” asking his 1987 audience to “try to see it through my then-naive eyes and remember that your present sophistication is the legacy of almost half a century of evolving inquiry.” Poor Merton was not only confronting the unfamiliar, he was also hungry and restless; this wasn’t how he would have chosen to spend a Saturday night. According to the 1961 New Yorker profile of the eminent professor, he “found the whole thing a bore and thought regretfully of the gulasch and patlatschinken that he was missing.”

Then a young colleague of Lazarsfeld’s interviewed the audience, trying to probe why they pressed the buttons they pressed – not just “did they like it,” but why. Merton got interested. He began to observe the interview keenly and to send Lazarsfeld notes – why doesn’t the interviewer pick up on what the interviewee is saying? Why hasn’t he followed up on this point? (Notes from meddling observers – usually clients – are now an omnipresent feature of the focus group.) Why is the interviewer guiding the respondents’ answers?

If he thought he could do so much better, Lazarsfeld asked Merton, why not try it himself? “As I was to learn over the years, this was altogether typical of [Lazarsfeld],” Merton would later explain, “He promptly co-opts me … That was not a defensive-aggressive question, as you might mistakenly suppose it was.” Merton did take a turn interviewing and the older man was thrilled with his approach. The two men telephoned their wives at the Lazarsfelds’ place, to let them know they were still working, then “unchivalrously” – as the New Yorker writer editorialized – retired to the Russian Bear, ate caviar, drank champagne and talked into the morning.

A lifelong collaboration between the two social scientists was born that night, one that significantly shaped the field of sociology. More importantly to contemporary culture, politics and everyday life, their friendship and partnership gave us the method that we now call the “focus group.”

Merton – who would, remember, later become famous for coining the term “role model” – jumped into Lazarsfeld’s project wholeheartedly, embracing the older man’s obsession with methodology. Merton explained, six months later, in a letter to his friend Kingsley Davis, another prominent sociologist, that he was spending six to eight hours a day on the This Is War research and was happy to do so, partly out of patriotism but also because the evolving methodology was exciting, allowing the researchers to test listeners’ reactions to material “on the spot” and, even more significantly, to be able to test “preliminary analysis and hunches … by direct observation of human beings in action.”

He sometimes chafed at some of the government’s rigid requirements. He wrote letters to his War Department supervisor complaining that the Army was pressuring his research team to deliver quantity over quality:

“Now it is true that with some inarticulate groups 12 or 15 minutes is quite enough because there is little to be gotten in any case. But with groups who really open up, 30 minutes for the interview itself is a dead minimum. Working on our present schedule I found it necessary time and again to cut off interviews long before they were fully exploited in order to race back to the preview room to instruct the next victim on the technique of pushing buttons. It seems a shame to devote so much loving care and attention to the entire set up and then have it go awry simply because we think ourselves compelled to operate on a group-per-hour basis.”

Merton felt the research would be stronger if they interviewed half as many groups and spent more time with them. But he was resigned to the fact that he wouldn’t be heard, writing, “But then you’ve heard all this before and I suppose we’ll have to bow to the dictates of the U.S. Army …”

Because of this work, and the effort he made to explain it to other researchers, Merton would be widely hailed as the “father of the focus group.” (Although he would also distance himself from the method, coyly remarking in 1987 that “there can’t be many people in the field of social science and certainly none in the related field of marketing research who know less about focus groups than I,” he would also acknowledge the many continuities between his own work and the modern focus group.) He would later clarify the principles he developed while working on these OWI projects in an article – later a booklet – called “The Focused Interview,” the article from which the “focus group” – a term not used until much later – would derive its name. The idea, as Merton outlined it, was that the interview would find out what people thought by focusing on a particular thing – a written text, a broadcast, a product they had just tried, an experience they have had – rather than conducting a wider-ranging exploration of their views. Hence, rather than asking people how they felt about Nazis, ask them to listen to a specific radio program about Nazis and answer specific questions about the program.

The focused interview made Lazarsfeld’s war propaganda research so much more revealing, because it allowed the team not only to collate and analyze yeses and nos but to ask why people reacted as they did. Lazarsfeld and Merton went on to do many more studies for the government on war propaganda and listeners’ reactions. And what they found out about listeners’ reactions to the war propaganda was often surprising and could never have been revealed by button-pushing alone.

At times the propaganda had the opposite effect on the audience than its creators intended. For instance, the programs, to convince Americans of the importance of fighting the Nazis, initially presented the Nazis as unusually bloodthirsty and brutal, inclined to treat civilians with cruelty and sadism. But this did not make Americans want to go to war with the Nazis – quite the contrary. If the audience had simply been pushing buttons, this would have been a mystifying finding – why not try to stop these horrible monsters? But the focused interview allowed the researchers to discover something no one had considered: portraying the Nazis in very scary terms was a mistake, because then the American audience wanted nothing to do with fighting them and was actually too frightened to support the war effort. Instead, American propaganda would emphasize our superior values: democracy and rationality.

To defend democracy, then, the Roosevelt administration had to first figure out what was going on with that mysterious demos. And that was the challenge out of which the focused interview – and later the focus group – emerged. Focus groups grew out of a unique moment in world history, in which democracy seemed threatened by enemies, yet full of potential. It was one in which leaders were beginning to grasp the gap between themselves and the masses, yet these same elites had great faith in the power of persuasion. They knew the people did not always agree with them but were confident they could be convinced.

The World War II liberals didn’t see themselves as sinister propagandists in the mold of Leni Riefenstahl, but neither did they want their actual policies to be shaped by public opinion. They drew a sharp distinction between themselves – the experts – and the general public. These technocrats wanted to convince the public that their ideas and values were the correct ones. The focus group was a fitting listening strategy for such an elite, allowing the researchers to focus on specific approaches, rather than discuss issues open-endedly, as in a town meeting. 

FDR’s propagandists saw Nazi propaganda as emotional and manipulative but saw their own as a form of rational persuasion. The massive propaganda effort conducted by the Roosevelt administration during this period signaled a mistrust of the people on the one hand – the sense that they wouldn’t come to the right conclusions just by reading the news – but on the other hand, a faith in their rationality. (This faith in objectivity, even as they developed methodologies to explore people’s highly subjective and emotional reactions to everything from radio jingles to racism, was critical to mid-century liberals.) This administration was confident in the idea that soft persuasion was better than force: no one was forced to save or buy bonds and there was no labor draft. The public was convinced – rather than forced or manipulated – to cooperate in the war effort.

Today focus groups embody the status quo – what is a more contemptuous political dismissal than to describe a position as having come from a focus group? But at its birth, the focus group emerged from left-leaning thought, from a liberal intelligentsia and elected leadership class, both of which sought to gain the masses’ consent for bold, ambitious plans.